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For those of you who have not seen a movie called “The History Boys” (Alan Bennet), it really does teach us history students to look at topics from a different perspective:

“Whereof one cannot speak,thereof one must be silent.”

That’s right, isn’t it, sir?
Wittgenstein.

– Yes, that’s good.
– No, it’s not good.

It’s flip, it’s glib,it’s journalism.

– It’s you that taught us it.
– I didn’t teach you.

And Wittgenstein did not screw it out of his very guts
(stutters) in order for youto turn it into a dinky formula.

Why can’t we simply just condemn the camps outright as an unprecedented horror?

There’s no point, sir.
Everybody will do that.

“The camp’s an event unlike any other.”

“The evil unprecedented.”

Et cetera, et cetera.

No! Can’t you see that even to say “et cetera” is… monstrous?

“Et cetera” is what the Nazis would have said.

The dead reduced to mere verbal abbreviation.

All right, not et cetera. But given that the death camps are thought of as unique,wouldn’t another approach be to show precedents?

– Put them, well, in proportion.
– Proportion?

Not proportion, then,but putting them in context.
But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and explained.And if it can be explained,then it can be explained away.

Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.

– That’s good, Posner.
– It isn’t good. I mean it, sir.

When we talk about putting them in context,it’s the same as the dissolution of the monasteries.Dozen of monasteries had been dissolved before Henry Vlll.The difference is I didn’t lose any relatives in the dissolution of the monasteries.

Good point.

You keep saying, “good point”.Not good point, sir. True!

To you, th-the Holocaust is just another topic on which we may or may not get a question.

No!

No! But this is history.Distance yourselves.

Our perspective on the past alters.And looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground – we don’t see it.And because we don’t see it, this means there
is no period so remote as the recent past.And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be.

– Even on the Holocaust.
– (bell rings)
– Won the argument there, sir.

Furthermore, have a look at this community programme in Cape Town whereby school children are being taken off the streets and put into a marching band, lowering thier risk of joining gangs, drug trades and crime.